Odinian Beta

Michael Mann is the author of the famed “hockey stick” graph included in an IPCC report two decades ago. This purported to show global temperatures rising dramatically in the 20th century after around 1,000 years or so of more or less similar temperatures.

To say that this was dubious conclusion is an understatement, as the Climategate emails released by an anonymous hacker proved.

A Disgrace to the Profession

Mark Steyn even went so far as to edit a book showing the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming based on the hockey-stick graph is highly dubious, concentrating on the world’s biggest advocate of this theory, one Michael Mann. The book is entitled A Disgrace to the Profession.

In summary, the title says it all!

Unfortunately for us Australians, Mr Mann decided to grace us with his presence by taking a sabbatical down under from December 2019.

Why he was let in the country after A Disgrace to the Profession was published is beyond me, but I guess the immigration bureaucrats and current Liberal government also believe in the global warming scam.

In any case, Mann arrived in Australia in December 2019 during one of the worst bushfire seasons in recent memory.

For those you aren’t Australian, bushfires (or wildfires) are part and parcel of every summer in Australia. This is a result of the original inhabitants of Australia, the Aborigines, deliberately burning Australian forests for thousands of years before the British settlers arrived via the First Fleet on 26 January, 1788.

By doing so, the Aborigines dramatically changed Australian flora and fauna. Their activities encouraged more fire-resistant plants such as eucalyptus trees, while causing the rapid retreat and even extinction of plants and animals that couldn’t adapt to the fires.

Once the British arrived, deliberate burning became less and less frequent as the Aborigines were pushed off their ancestral lands by the new settlers.

Less controlled burning = more bushfires

This had the obvious result of more frequent, and often more devastating, bushfires.

Every now and then Australia has a really bad bushfire season. One notorious season was in 1994, when the world was treated to headlines of bushfires encroaching close to the Sydney CBD. (The fact that Sydney has bush (or forests) that extend very close to the CBD was overlooked by the reporters for some reason!)

Mann happened to arrive near the end of a very bad drought caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon. El Nino causes drier weather and droughts on Australia’s east coast while causing rains and floods on the other side of the Pacific Ocean such as on the west coasts of both the Americas.

The lack of rain (see image below) and insufficient precautionary backburning by the authorities made 2019/2020 another bad bushfire season.

Of course, Mann avoided mentioning all this whenever he was interviewed by the media. Instead, he used the 2019/2020 bushfires to propagate his theory of ever worsening “climate change” (formerly known as “global warming”, and before that, “global cooling”).

The Drought Breaker

As Australians know through the famous song by Dorothea Mackellar, Australia is a land “of droughts and flooding rains”.

The flooding rains duly arrived.

Sydney experienced heavy rainfall in February 2020 due to a periodic East Coast Low, which extinguished most of the fires then still raging.

Australia’s drought was broken.

Given the “flooding rains” arrived so soon after Mann graced us with his presence, I think it is fair to conclude that there is a direct causal relationship between his arrival and the breaking of the drought.

Hence my nickname for Mann: The Drought Breaker.

(I should note that there is far more evidence for my theory than that behind the man-made global warming hoax. But I digress.)

Australia has experienced La Ninas the past two summers. La Nina is the exact opposite of El Nino, whereby eastern Australia is wetter than usual while the west coasts of the Americas are drier than usual.

This has led to floods in Sydney in each of the past three years, and filled up our inland rivers and lakes. There have also been floods elsewhere on the east coast, including in south-east Queensland and the far north coast of New South Wales earlier in 2022.

In Sydney alone, the Hawkesbury-Nepean river system burst its banks in each of the last three years. This has led to both the North Richmond Bridge – which hadn’t flooded for 28 years – and the new bridge at Windsor flooding in each of the last three years.

So much rain…

In fact, there has been so much rain since Mann arrived that no part of Australia – none – was officially in drought by the end of 2021.

That this could occur in such a notoriously dry continent speaks volumes to Mann’s impact as The Drought Breaker.

So thank you Michael for gracing us with your presence, for bringing the rains and ending the drought. I hope you can return and weave your drought-breaking magic after the next inevitable drought (which will occur solely due to weather variability and not due to the climate change scam you so strongly believe in).

Readers might be asking what happened to Michael Mann after the drought broke.

Well, as far as I can determine, he stopped being so prominent in the Australian media, then quietly slunk back to the United States.

Funny, that!